It is generally accepted that woodland clearings were utilized by Mesolithic human populations (populations in Europe roughly 7,000 to 12,000 years ago) for food procurement. Whether there was deliberate removal of tree cover to attract grazing animals or whether naturally created clearings just afforded opportunistic hunting, the common view is that clearings had an economic use. The archaeological evidence for this, however, is at best circumstantial. Some locales where the presence of clearings has been demonstrated in the paleoecological record of vegetation have also yielded human artifacts from around the same time, but the two kinds of evidence are never securely linked. Furthermore, artifactual evidence that preparation of animals for human consumption took place within or near such clearings is generally lacking.

Most of the evidence invoked in favor of the resource-procurement model for clearings comes from ethnography rather than archaeology, and principally from the recognition that some recent premodern populations used fire to increase grazing areas. But while some ethnographic evidence has been used to bolster the resource-procurement model, other ethnographic evidence may suggest a different vision, a noneconomic one, of why clearings may have been deliberately created and/or used.

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues that right up through the modern era, human behavior has been driven by fear of the wilderness. While we might be tempted to see this kind of anxiety as a product of modern urban life, it is clear that such fears are also manifest in preliterate and nonurban societies. If we apply this insight to the Mesolithic era, our view of the purpose and use of woodland clearings may change.

We have recently become aware of the importance of woodland paths in prehistory. The fact that Mesolithic human populations moved around the landscape is not a new idea. However, the fact that they may have done so along prescribed pathways has only recently come to the fore. I propose that one of the primary motivators in establishing paths may have been fear of the wooded surroundings—whether fear of harm from wildlife or spirits, or of simply getting lost.

From this view an alternative hypothesis may be developed. First, paths become established and acquire a measure of long-term permanence. Then this permanence leads to concentration of activity in some areas (near the paths) rather than others (away from the paths). This allows us to legitimately consider wilderness as a motivating concept in the Mesolithic, and may force us to consider environment as more than "backdrop." And finally, it may lead us to explain some clearings as purely social phenomena, since where paths meet, wider clearings emerge as corners are cut and intersections become convenient spots for resting.